A cellular phone may include an audio capture device, such as a microphone or speech synthesizer, and an audio encoder to generate audio packets (or frames). The phone may use communication protocol layers and modules, such as a radio link protocol (RLP) module, a medium access control (MAC) layer, and a physical (PHY) layer. The phone may place audio packets in a RLP queue. A MAC layer module may generate MAC layer packets from contents of the RLP queue. The MAC layer packets may be converted to PHY layer packets for transmission across a communication channel to another communication device.